Richard Rudeloff and granddaughter Ashleigh Chesnut will hold a book signing and sale of his autobiography at the Wicker Basket, 300 N. Washington St., Saturday, Feb. 2.

Rudeloff says that his book, titled The Kaleidoscope I Call My Life, is the story of the highlights of his life – a story that is always colorful, sometimes with beautiful colors and sometimes not so beautiful.

He was born Feb. 7, 1924, in Seguin. Two years later, the family moved to Tynan, and at the age of 12, after he had learned to speak a foreign language (English), the family moved to Beeville, where he graduated from A.C. Jones High School with the class of 1941. Soon thereafter, he says, “I received an offer from the Bee County Selective Service Board.” (Incidentally, its chairman was Reginald West Sr., whose daughter, Martha, he was to marry 62 years later).

“Anyway,” he says, “I was drafted into the Army Air Force and was trained to be a meteorologist (weatherman).” Rudeloff says he was sent to China, where he was made a member of a six-man OSS team under the command of Capt. John Birch – the John Birch who was later killed by the Chinese Communists. In China, Rudeloff says they set up their weather station, deep within the territory occupied by the Japanese. He states they hid from the Japanese by living in a small, squalid Chinese village.

After the war ended, Rudeloff states, he returned home and went to Texas A&M and the University of Texas at Austin and got a degree from each. He practiced law in Beeville and the surrounding counties for 50 years. Sixteen of those years, he relates, he was county attorney for Bee County.

Because the U.S. government had sent him to the Orient for three years, Rudeloff states he had a yearning for those “distant places with names you cannot pronounce” and got hooked on seeing the world. During the following years, he visited those faraway places with strange-sounding names, including a 96-day solo trip around the world, stopping and visiting 42 selected places. “I wrote in detail about my adventures in each of these places,” he says.

“In 1990,” Rudeloff states, “I taught American Jurisprudence (upon invitation) at the University of Kazakh in the state of Kazakhstan in the former USSR.” He was placed on the university’s staff and paid the same as their professors, he says.

Rudeloff says he now spends his time writing about his adventures, taking them or planning them.